osaic was widely used for the decoration of Early Christian and Byzantine churches and there are splendid cycles in Rome, Ravenna, Venice, and Greece as well as in Sicily. It was the dominant form of decoration for the Eastern Orthodox church. After the 13th Century, in the West, it was largely superseded by fresco painting. However, the art of mosaic was still practiced in Venice into the 15th Century. None of the secondary schools outside Byzantium could carry on for an appreciable time without sending to Constantinople for more trained mosaicists; that city always maintained a kind of monopoly on the craft.

The technique is simple but laborious. The raw materials are small cubes, about the size of dice, called tesserae. They can be chipped from slabs of colored stone and marble; made of luminous colored glass or of tiny sandwiches of glass and gold bonded together so that each material imparts an added measure of radiance to the other. Coarse plaster laden with straw is troweled onto the wall and over it a smoother coat is spread in areas just large enough to cover with mosaics before the bed hardens. Designs from carefully prepared cartoons are transferred onto the wet surface and then the master mosaicists push each tessera, one by one, into the bed of cement. Every piece is angled in relation to the surface plane in such a way that the light will shimmer when reflected off wall.

The mosaic technique was something entirely unknown to the Normans before King Ruggero. Mosaic probably appealed to him as a fitting way to show his stature as self-styled oriental potentate. The slow, laborious and costly process also presupposes a great deal of political stability which in fact had been reached by the end of the 1130s.

The technique of mosaic was easy enough to acquire in the rough, but the degree of refinement demonstrated in the Cefalu' decorations means that Ruggero undoubtedly imported Greek mosaicists from Byzantium; at least at the outset of the project. This fits his habit of never acquiring anything secondhand.

THE MOSAICS AT CEFALU'

Although not the earliest examples on Sicilian soil, the mosaics at Cefalu' are the best preserved. They certainly lead in artistic quality and their influence can be traced in other Sicilian projects. As with the architecture of the cathedral, the decoration seems to represent only part of a great plan, abandoned as soon as the political constellation responsible for its conception had changed, and taken up again at a later time to be completed on a reduced scale. The plan was altered once more by the additions of the 13th Century, which had nothing to do with the original program.

The mosaic decorations at Cefalu' differ from most in that they are works of consummate draftsmanship; a sense of monumentality is achieved through cascading, surging lines. Contours are greatly simplified, serving to silhouette the figures against the golden ground. It is also an extremely expressive line in the figures that brings out the different psychological types. The human warmth and ascetic distinction of the faces gives them a powerful, penetrating force. In the Cathedral of Cefalu', the classical restraint of earlier Greek models is all but gone.

The Byzantine motifs usually relegated to the dome, the Ascension and Second Coming of Christ, are transferred to the apse at Cefalu'. The monumental half-figure of the Pantocrator, which ordinarily would have fit into a circle in the main dome as well, is adapted to a conch in the apse which it fully dominates. Below this bust, the two lower stories are pierced, in the middle axis, by a window with a pointed arch which, together with a horizontal band of formal ornament, divides the surface into four parts, each containing three standing figures of Apostles. The single figures along the walls of the presbytery are arranged in four horizontal bands which correspond to these zones in the apse. The walls and the vault of the first bay of the presbytery are completely covered with mosaics, leaving only a comparatively high socle, which has a later Baroque design. The coloristic effects of the vault mosaics are rich but less delicate than those in the apse. The same is true, in varying degrees, of the mosaics on the side walls of the presbytery. Any attempt at dating the various parts of the mosaic decoration must start with the year 1148, which marks the completion of the apse.

Native Sicilian craftsmen may have superseded their Greek masters in this work. It is certain that initially the former worked side-by-side with the latter and forged a new idiom unlike that of the original Greek. If the mosaics at Cefalu' are celebrated as purely Greek works on Sicilian soil, this applies only to the apse proper. It is quite in keeping with the intrinsic value of this decoration as a work of art that it became the model for important parts of the decoration of the Palatine, the Martorana, and of Monreale.

The centerpiece of the mosaic decorations at Cefalu' is a portrait of Christ as Pantocrator, the omnipotent ruler of the cosmos. He blesses with His right hand and holds in His left an open book with Greek and Latin texts on the two opposing pages.

The monumental size of the bust is unprecedented in Byzantine programs. Possibly the finest surviving mosaic in any Sicilian church, the features of the face are aesthetically beautiful and deeply humane.

An uneven surface means the tesserae will catch the light and reflect it in different ways. Consequently, the mosaicists took great care to ensure that each piece was angled; none was perfectly flat or level.

Founded in 1174 by Ruggero's grandson William II, The Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily has the second largest mosaic decor in the world after Santa Sophia in Istanbul. Monreale's mosaic decorations are so lush as to even cover the columns of its cloister.

All photos ©Roger Shepherd